MESSIAH

Even as early as age twelve, Jesus refers to God as "My Father" (Luke 2:49). He continues to use the term throughout the Gospel accounts-a total of forty times! Jerusalem scholar, Dr. Robert Lindsey, explains the significance of this expression:
 
Synagogue prayers contain the expression, "Our Father [Avinu] who is in heaven," many times, and Jesus taught His disciples to pray a prayer which also begins, "Our Father who is in heaven." The expression, "My Father [avi]," however, almost certainly must have seemed improper to the Jews of that period. Only once in the Hebrew Scripture is God referred to as "my Father," and that is in Psalm 89, which speaks of the coming Messiah. Verse 26 reads, "He will call to me, 'Avi ata'-'You are my Father! The Messiah has the right to call God "my Father." I am quite sure that the rabbis of Jesus' day taught the people to say "Our Father who is in heaven," because they say "my Father" was reserved for the Messiah alone.
 
Second Samuel 7:14 also contains a prophecy about the Messiah: "I will be to him a father, and he will be to me a son." This verse marks the beginning of a coming Messiah who is the son of God.
 
It was known from Psalm 89:26, 2 Samuel 7:14 and Psalm 2:7 that the Messiah would be the son of God, but these verses do not contain the expression "son of God." What is used is, "He will call to me, 'You are my Father' "; "I will be a father to him, he will be a son to me"; and, "You are my son, this day I have brought you forth." This is the Hebraic way of expressing messiahship -it is the way the Holy Spirit spoke and the way Jesus spoke.
 
Jesus also declared Himself Messiah by the things He did. Look at John the Baptist in John 11. He sits in Herod's prison, and with free time on his hands he begins to review the events of his life. He especially reflects on whether or not he should have been referring his disciples to Jesus several months back (John 1:35-37). Having some doubts, he sends a question to Jesus by way of his disciples: "Are you the coming one, or shall we look for someone else?" (Matthew 11:3). Jesus tells John's disciples:
 
Go and report to John the things which you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them (Matthew 11:5).
 
Jesus drew these words from two verses found in Isaiah. The first, 35:5, occurs in the midst of a passage speaking of the arrival of the kingdom of God in Zion. The second, 61:1, is found in a context announcing the favorable year of the Lord. John, therefore, would have understood Jesus as saying not only "Yes, I am the Messiah," but also, "Here, I'm willing to give you proof no one else can bring that my claims are true." In this sense, every time Jesus healed someone or performed some attesting sign, He was declaring Himself to be Messiah.
 
Jesus declared Himself to be Messiah by His triumphal entry into Jerusalem. A verse in the Babylonian Talmud Menahoth has Rabbi Yohanan explaining that "outside the wall" of Jerusalem means not further than the wall of Bethphage. When Jesus mounts the donkey foal in Bethphage and rides into Jerusalem, He is making a very definite statement that He understands Himself to be the Messiah. He clearly intends to fulfill Zechariah 9:9:
 
Rejoice greatly, 0 daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, 0 daughter of Jerusalem! Behold your King is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, Humble, mounted on a donkey, Even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
 
The people clearly understood Jesus' intentions. Fleming states:
 
The palm became a symbol of Jewish nationalism. But on Palm Sunday the poor population of Jerusalem was feeling the heavy arm of Rome over them. There was a popular understanding by Jews of Jesus' day that Messiah would come during the Passover season. (Do you remember in John's Gospel that, after Jesus fed the 5,000, the people "wanted to make Him king because it was Passover"?) The role Messiah would play in the hopes of the populace was that He would deliver the people from oppression ... as in the days of the exodus from Egypt. By bringing the palm branches the people were in a way saying, "Jesus, we are all with you ... you see you have enough of a following to do something about the Roman garrison in Jerusalem."
 
In John 4, Jesus spoke with a Samaritan woman outside the city of Sychar. In the course of their conversation,
the woman said to Him, "I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that one comes, He will declare all things to us" (John 4:25).
 
Jesus probably felt more freedom in Samaria about disclosing His identity. Messianic expectations were quite subdued since the Samaritans believed only in the Pentateuch. Jesus therefore revealed to the woman, "I who speak to you am He" (John 4:26).
 
There was no question about it. Jesus clearly declared Himself to be the Messiah.
 
Another declaration of Jesus that He was the Messiah occurred at His trial before the high priest Caiaphas, the chief priests, and the elders and scribes (Matthew 26:57-68; Mark 14:53-65). In Mark's account, the high priest finally asked Jesus directly, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?" and Jesus responded, "I am; and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven." Notice that Jesus clearly spoke of Himself.
 
The term "Son of Man" was the way He usually referred to Himself. Son of Man occurs 81 times in the Gospel accounts. Notice also that Jesus clearly identified Himself as the one about whom Daniel prophesied when He revealed,
 
I kept looking in the night visions,
And behold, with the clouds of heaven
One like a Son of Man was coming,
And he came up to the Ancient of Days
And was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion,
Glory and a kingdom,
That all the peoples, nations, and men of every language
Might serve Him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
Which will not pass away;
And His kingdom is one
Which will not be destroyed (Daniel 7:13,14).
 
In this passage Daniel reveals this coming one, and Jesus claims for Himself. (1) that He will come with or on the clouds of heaven; and (2) He will be given supreme authority over all mankind for all eternity. For the Sadducees, who controlled the Sanhedrin at this time and for whom "the Messianic hope played no role," 37/n.p. this claim was tantamount to blasphemy. (Blasphemy meant not just a claim to be God, but also slander against God or even against other persons.) Though the concept of Messiah would have been interpreted differently by Jesus, the scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees, there can be no doubt that Jesus clearly claimed He was that Son of Man to come, the Messiah.
 
That Jesus claimed to be Messiah is confirmed by the report, which the Sanhedrin must have delivered to Pilate in view of that claim. Norman Anderson explains:
 
The crucifixion, however, does seem to provide convincing proof of one point about which New Testament scholars have been much divided-and to which passing reference has already been made: namely, that Jesus Himself did believe that He was the Messiah. It is true that He did not make any such claim explicitly in His public preaching- partly, no doubt, for political reasons, but largely because of the mistaken expectations this would have aroused among His hearers. But it was clearly as a potential threat to Rome that Pilate and his minions delivered Him to a death largely reserved for the armed robber and the political insurgent. This is explicit in the inscription on the cross: "JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS" (John 19:19), which would seem to echo the Evangelists' report that part of the conversation between Pilate and Jesus had been about this very point (Matthew 27:11; Mark 15:2; Luke 23:3; John 18:33-37). And this, in its turn, must have been prompted by the fact that the "blasphemy" for which the Sanhedrin had condemned Him was His reply to the question (put to Him on oath by the high priest), "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?" with the words: "I am ... And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the mighty one and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:61-64) -an affirmation that had naturally been reported by the chief priests to Pilate in explicitly political terms.
 
Though a number of Jewish scholars in the past have attempted to deny that Jesus thought of Himself as the Messiah, others now support His messianic consciousness. One is Samuel Sandmel, recognized as the leading U. S. Jewish authority in the New Testament and early Christianity. He was a professor at Yale, then at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati up to his death in 1979. Sandmel concluded, "I believe that He believed Himself to be the Messiah, and that those scholars who deny this are incorrect."
 
David Flusser, professor of comparative religion at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, like other Jewish scholars, sees "inauthentic" passages in the Gospel texts. Still he maintains that "other apparently authentic sayings of Jesus can be understood only if it is assumed that Jesus thought Himself to be the Son of Man." For Flusser, Jesus' concept of "Son of Man" was both messianic and divine.


WAS JESUS THE MESSIAH?


 
In the Old Testament, there are hundreds of prophesies alluding to the coming Messiah. The brilliant nineteenth-century Oxford professor, Canon Henry Liddon, found 332 "distinct predictions, which were literally fulfilled in Christ." [See Evidence That Demands a Verdict, pp. 145-175, for specific prophecies.]
 
For example, Daniel 9:25,26 indicates that the Messiah had to come before the second Temple was destroyed (A.D. 70). Micah 5:2 speaks of the Messiah's birthplace as Bethlehem Ephrathah, the town where Jesus was born. Isaiah 35:5,6 speaks of the blind, deaf, lame and dumb being healed. Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6 speak of the Messiah as a light to the Gentiles. Zechariah 9:9 predicts that the Messiah would come humbly, "mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey." Psalm 22 provides a graphic description of one undergoing crucifixion (even though crucifixion was unknown to the psalmist), and Jesus quoted its opening verse as He hung on the cross. Zechariah 12:9,10 even mentions in one passage the two separate comings of the Messiah:
 
And it will come about in that day that I will be about to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem [second coming]. And I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced [occurred at the first coming]; and they will mourn for Him, like the bitter weeping over a first-born.
 
But the Christian must be careful not to overstate the case. There are hundreds of additional messianic prophecies in the Old Testament, which have not yet found their fulfillment in Jesus. This is by necessity, for if it is prophesied that the Messiah had to suffer and die and yet is also to subsequently reign over an eternal kingdom (at least part of which is established on earth) then it follows that Messiah must somehow rise from the dead and come again. The most important and overlooked question is: Does the Old Testament predict that the Messiah must first suffer and die?
 
Christians and critics alike today are often so focused on the issue of Jesus' resurrection that they forget the other half of the apostles' preaching. Peter preached in the Temple, "But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ should suffer, He has thus fulfilled" (Acts 3:18).
 
Paul reasoned with the Thessalonians in their synagogue. He was "explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and saying, 'This Jesus whom I am proclaiming to you is the Christ' " (Acts 17:3). Before King Agrippa Paul reported:
 
And so, having obtained help from God, I stand to this day testifying both to small and great, stating nothing but what the Prophets and Moses said was going to take place; that the Christ was to suffer, and that by reason of His resurrection from the dead He should be the first to proclaim light both to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles (Acts 26:22,23).
 
The apostles were saying nothing new. Jesus Himself repeatedly stated that He had to go to Jerusalem to suffer, die and be raised from the dead (Matthew 16:21; 17:12; Mark 8:31; 9:12; Luke 9:22; 17:25; 22:15; 24:26,46). But where in the Old Testament was this prophesied?
 
Many Jewish people today are surprised to find the following passage in the Jewish Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament:
 
See, my servant will act wisely; he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted. Just as there were many who were appalled at him-his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness -so will he sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.
 
Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
 
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
 
Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand. After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isaiah 52:13-53:12, NIV, written ca 700 B.C.).
 
For more than 1700 years, the Jewish rabbis interpreted this passage almost unanimously as referring to the Messiah. This fact is thoroughly documented in S. R. Driver and Adolf Neubauer's The Fifty-Third Chapter of Isaiah According to the Jewish Interpreters. 19/37-39 They quote numerous rabbis during this period who equated the servant of Isaiah 53 with the Messiah.
 
Not until the twelfth century A.D., no doubt under the suffering of the Jews at the hand of the Crusaders, did any Jewish interpreter say that Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12 refers to the whole nation of Israel, the most common interpretation today among Jewish scholars. Even after Rashi (Rabbi Solomon Yazchaki) first proposed this interpretation, however, many other Jewish interpreters have held, even to the present, the traditional Talmudic view that Isaiah 53 speaks of the Messiah. One of the most respected Jewish intellectuals of all history, Moses Maimonides (A.D. 1135 -1204) rejected Rashi's interpretation, and he taught that the passage was messianic.
 
Rashi and other Jewish interpreters are not necessarily grasping at straws to suggest that the servant is the nation of Israel. Isaiah 43:10 (NIV) says to the people of Israel: " 'You are My witnesses,' declares the LORD, 'and My servant whom I have chosen.' " Surely, then, the servant must be Israel.
 
That this interpretation is in error can first be seen in Isaiah 52:14 where the nation of Israel is compared to the servant: "Just as many were astonished at you, My people, so his appearance was marred more than any man." In 53:8, the servant bears punishment that should have been born by "my people" (obviously Israel). It makes no sense for the nation of Israel to bear substitutionary punishment for the nation of Israel. Therefore Israel cannot be the servant of Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12.
 
But what about Isaiah 49:3: "And He said to Me, 'You are My Servant, Israel, in Whom I will show My glory"'? Good point! We're glad you brought it up. The key to identifying the servant in Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12 is to see who he is in the three previous "servant songs" of Isaiah: 42:1-9; 49:1-12; and 50:4-9. Since these passages spoke of the servant, for example, establishing justice in the earth (Isaiah 42:4) and regathering the Jewish people from worldwide exile (Isaiah 49:8-13), Jewish interpreters have traditionally held the servant songs to be speaking of the Messiah, not the nation of Israel. Even Isaiah 49:3 does not say that Israel is the servant; rather it says that the servant (Messiah) is the true Israel! In verse 5 and 6 we see: "Now says the LORD, who formed Me from the womb to be His servant. . . 'to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved ones of Israel.' " The point is that Jacob (Israel) had gone astray, especially from the commission God gave to him: "In you and in your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed" (Genesis 28:14). The Servant (Messiah) was now to stand in Israel's place to do two things: (1) to bring the nation of Israel back to God (Isaiah 49:5); and (2) to be a light to the nations, as seen in verse 6:
 
It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant.... I will also make You a light of the nations so that My salvation may reach to the end of the earth.
 
If you caught what is going on here in Isaiah, you probably realize why Jesus so often appealed or alluded to this prophet. The Servant is the Messiah. The Messiah had to suffer and die for many. He also had to be raised from the dead (Psalm 16:10). When the monumental event of the resurrection did occur and the disciples were filled at Pentecost with the Spirit of God, they preached everywhere the message "that Messiah died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3,4). To judge from the earliest surviving Christian literature, 1 Thessalonians, they also preached that the Messiah would come again.
 
Was Jesus the Messiah? If not, then there is to be no Messiah. No one prior to A.D. 70 had His credentials. All the prophecies which could be fulfilled in His first coming were fulfilled in Jesus. And He sealed it all with His own resurrection from the dead. It is therefore fitting to refer to Jesus as the Christ if one uses Greek terminology, or as the Messiah if one uses Hebrew terminology